History

The origin of each markup language — who created it, when, and why.

HTML

Created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 at CERN as the document format for the newly invented World Wide Web, drawing on SGML for its tag-based structure so documents could be linked and displayed by browsers.

XML

Published by the W3C in 1998 as a simplified, stricter subset of SGML, designed to be a general-purpose, machine-readable markup format for data and documents rather than tied to any one domain like HTML.

Markdown

Created by John Gruber (with Aaron Swartz) in 2004 as a plain-text formatting syntax that could be converted to HTML, intended to be readable as-is without rendering.

AsciiDoc

Created by Stuart Rackham in 2002 as a plain-text markup syntax for technical documentation, later extended significantly by the Asciidoctor project and toolchain.

reStructuredText

Introduced in the early 2000s as part of the Python community’s docutils project, designed as an unambiguous, extensible plain-text markup syntax for Python documentation.

LaTeX

Created by Leslie Lamport in 1985 as a set of macros built on Donald Knuth’s TeX typesetting system, aimed at making high-quality typesetting accessible without manual layout work.